I was actually an owner of a Game Gear for a time, but its battery life of about fifteen minutes made its viability as a portable system kind of suffer. But a few years later I felt that hendheld color video game consoles had made enough progress that I could give it another shot, so I picked up a Game Boy Color. And even though the Game Boy Color could play all of my classic Game Boy games, I still wanted to get something to bask in the more-than-four-shades-of-greenish-grey screen. So I picked up a version of the old standby, Tetris, incarnated as Tetris DX.
This game is really just the same as the pack-in Tetris game I got with my original gigantic Game Boy in ‘89, but with little splashes of color everywhere and some slightly tweaked gameplay mechanics.
But I guess, as the saying goes, it wasn’t broken, so there was nothing to fix. You can still play endless mode until your brain and fingers just can’t keep up, or you can play “B Mode” where the playfield is drastically shortened. Or, if you were lucky enough to know someone with a Game Boy Color and this game and had the forethought to bring your link cable along, then some head-to-head action could be had.
It’s weird, every few years a new system will come out and eventually there will be a version of Tetris for it. Then I’ll inevitably pick it up and realize that I haven’t played the game in quite some time, which will lead to me losing far too many hours to it until the next system comes along and I pick up its version of Tetris.
I do sometimes wonder, though, how many times Nintendo can sell me the same game.